Aerodynamic inverse design using an adjoint-free gradient-based method

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Abstract This paper presents a new sensitivity analysis for aerodynamic inverse design problems. Both incompressible and compressible flows are considered. The objective of inverse design problem considered here is to infer the airfoil shape that produces a desired pressure distribution. Based on an idea of considering significant sensitivity coefficients only as well as partial differentiation, a sensitivity matrix is formed which enables us to compute all sensitivity coefficients at each iteration during the minimization process with no need to additional flow solutions or adjoint equation solution to calculate the derivative of objective function with respect to design variables. We show by considering a few test cases that the proposed method is very efficient, accurate, robust, and easy to implement.